Macey stares at her simple reflection in the mirror: A pair of baby blue eyes. A slightly flat nose. The chubbiness of her cheeks, just starting to slim around contours littered with freckles. Someone once called them cute, but those words are too hollow right now, too hollow for an empty bathroom. For a moment she wishes it could have faded sooner, and the thought dissolves into the mindlessly humid air of July as she starts applying foundation.
 
It was the only bathroom in their gym, and there was only one gym in their high school, which was the only high school in their town. She could hear excited voices outside. After all, their graduation ceremony had just ended; her classmates deserved to be happy. Three months later they’ll be packing their bags and flying off to each individual future awaiting, but Macey is staying, the only one staying. There is no bitterness to the statement though, because who would want to stay in a town that only had one high school?
 
The voices grow loud, almost invasive, the door letting out an awkward, dumb creak. Someone had come in. Macey is devoted to her work at hand, now determined to fix the acnes on her chin. She needs to take pictures later.
 
Vivian, the class valedictorian walks in, her robe still clean and pristine after a 30-minute speech before a bunch of sweaty, bright-eyed teenagers. They were still using the same air condition system when the school was built in the 80s, and Macey lets herself wonder, viciously, how unpleasant it feels to wear a bra under those layers of heavy black material.
She moves in front of the mirror, the sound of stout heels touching plastic floor echoing in the silence. It makes Macey nauseous, as if she was a Renaissance painter trying to create a really nice picture when one of those little pretty fairy imps magicked its way in the frame. She wasn’t aware they had existed, or at least tried to forget.

Vivian undoes her hair. Macey notices her eyes look tired but makes no comment, since they are long past the point of establishing friendly small talk considering the incident in middle school. Another beautiful perk of growing up here, a town with its population under 900 residents: you can never really avoid a person, not when social circles are so tightly knitted to the point of suffocation.

To her disappointment (and expectation) Vivian seems to think otherwise. After splashing her face with water, she opens her mouth.

“You’re not wearing your robe.” Vivian starts scrubbing on her mortarboard tentatively. Macey wonders if this action is meant to distract herself from the conversation, or if the conversation was supposed to be distraction for menial labor. She sneaks a glimpse the cap and finds it ugly, shrunk, defeated by tap water, suddenly becomes aware that she had been starting at it for too long. She quickly thinks of a retort, yet no words suffice.

“Well, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s too hot in here.” Macey hopes she sounds mean.

Vivian gives her an unimpressed look, “I hope the layers of makeup on your face eases the heat.”
She sighs. Three years of not talking and this is what they have right now, what they need to deal with. Maybe Vivian thinks the same. It is a fact they’ll never see each other again. Maybe Vivian wants overdue closure for pre-teen drama, which is also understandable. 

“Is Ms. Ivy League trying to give me a feminist lecture? Because you can cut it. I post content online that you would probably consider sexual exploitation or something.” It’s true, and it’s not as bad as it sounds, standing on the borderline of sexual – internet fame, as it proves, pays well – but she hadn’t meant for it to come out.

“So you have a job with reasonably stable income. I’m not going to judge.” Macey can spot the visible crease in Vivian’s brows and laughs, internally, at her discomfort. If Vivian is concerned, protective, jealous even, she had lost that privilege a few years ago. Macey chews on that knowledge with spite and guilt before swallowing it like a coward. They’ve both decided to skirt around the obvious subject of Macey’s withdrawal from their collective departure. Macey believes this is a sign of maturity and stabs her cheekbones with a battered blender, feeling somehow victorious.

“Don’t abuse your face like that.” Vivian says, stopping to rinse her hands for a bit.

“It looks better this way.” For business, she means.

“I think it’s pretty cute already.” The words land at the edge of the rectangular sink, and there is an excruciating pressure in the air minutes after they wash down the drain, along with makeup residue and whatever tainted Vivian’s precious hat. Macey dabs at her eyes.

“I also do shifts at Walmart.” She replies drily, well aware it does nothing to divert the heavy tension back to their previous topic.

She lets her mind stray back to memory lane because she was feeling fragile and there was nothing to do except for staring back at the decorated face in the mirror, an image becoming unfamiliar and scary to Macey.

There was a time when they could chase each other down the junk food aisles and collapse onto the dirty beanbags just around the corner, getting shooed off by employees. Now it’s Macey’s job to shoo kids off and she mastered it in one hour, felt so unexplainably guilty afterwards. There was a time when they were kids, just kids, and hosted birthday parties just to make a wish alongside each other, because it would be meaningless if done any other way. Macey spent her last birthday peacefully drunk in a city bar, surrounded by friends who took funny pictures of her. Nothing felt missing, just horribly wrong. Macey wouldn’t want to put Vivian in those pictures anyway. She knew Vivian was better than this.

There was a time when Macey thought she would be getting drunk with Vivian, passing out on her couch that had a fond smell to them. There were many firsts she once thought would be a shared experience between them, so naturally they went to the 8th grade formal together, and Vivian didn’t handle the repercussions well. She considered these rumors nasty and juvenile given that they were going as friends, so Macey discarded the idea of having other firsts together, now knowing that they were nasty and juvenile in Vivian’s view. High school came, and eventually those firsts were had, but they all passed like tests she had to sit through.

“I’m taking a gap year. You know that, right?” Vivian’s voice caught her unprepared, like they were five again, playing hide and seek.

“What?” Macey turns to face her, and as she does so, realizes they weren’t talking to each other’s faces this whole time, strangely.

“I kind of opened the speech announcing that?” Vivian looks cleaner, and it’s probably because the mirror hasn’t been properly mopped in ages. But the weariness in her eyes seem to have been washed out by the continuous scrubbing, which already came to a stop when she revealed the shocking information, being replaced by a gaze that looked painfully nostalgic to Macey.

“I wasn’t really paying attention. Uh, no offense.” Macey didn’t know what to think right now. It was always a known fact, a grounded truth, that Vivian would go to some prestigious university and get out of here as soon as she got the chance to. To people like Vivian the town was a burden, a sweet one at most, something to be buried and briefly mentioned at parties in a nonchalant manner. Wasn’t it?

Vivian shrugs, and again Macey finds her movement so fluid like she wasn’t carrying any burden at all. What entered the bathroom with her slid off her shoulders like water flowing down the pipes, or maybe it was nonexistent from the beginning, a product of Macey’s imagination. 
“It’s fine.” She started to explain, answering the unasked why? hanging there, “It’d be good, I thought, to have some time off. A summer of soul-searching. What they do in the movies.” She joked.

Macey had to ask anyway. Mute receptiveness felt uneasy; she was filled to the brim with childish excitement. “What made you change your mind?”

“Honestly? It’s scary, going to college.” Her voice is soft, “And I guess I forgot – we all forget – I’m still a kid. A teenager. Kids get scared so easily. So I’ll allow myself to be scared, for some time.”

Macey nods, her hands still applying makeup automatically. Understanding Vivian was always easy, but this wasn’t one of those cases. She felt like the best hide-and-seek player in the world, so good at it that she made everyone gave up and abandon the game, heading to their respective homes, but Vivian, strategical and stubborn, managed to find her and made her question why she was hiding there in the first place.

It was not newfound vulnerability but an uncovered recognition. I know you know I know.
Vivian keeps talking, the words visibly spilling out now, a sight Macey missed very much. “The plan is to move downtown, do some translating online–” She is rambling at this point, Macey thinks, and lets the words wash down her own body, pouring into her ear like “I’ve already applied to a nice platform, and what I have in mind is well, Walmart’s not that far away, and rent is demanding – anyways, if you’d like to.”
 
“If you’d like to.” She repeats hesitantly.

Macey is overwhelmed, drowning. Silky, warm substances drip past her cheeks, and she’s not sure if those are tears, or imaginary water, or something else.

It’s Vivian’s robe. Precisely, a corner of the robe she’s holding out, carefully wiping Macey’s face with. “Sorry for ruining it.” She winces, “But you were putting mascara on your mouth. I don’t want you to get angry, but I also don’t want you to get cancer.”

Macey dips down, the mirror’s contents flashing for a second, and washes the makeup off.
She dives up. Her face appears unbothered, happy, and she decides it should stay that way. Macey glances at Vivian before speaking, their faces aligned in the mirror, accompanied.
“You’re right. It’s way too hot in here. Your place downtown better have good AC.”

This will be the afternoon Macey recalls when she moves in the apartment, which happened to have a large, round mirror by the front door, when she finds herself curiously looking at her reflection: eyes, nose, cheeks, still a bit adolescent, clothes that fit without extra effort and a smile that was apparently there all along, when Vivian comes up behind, looking absurdly domestic, and seems to ask with her eyes, remember when you thought I was too good for this town? Remember when you thought I was too good for you? In the coming years they’ll look back on this and laugh, together, for as many times as they want.